skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I actually have zero good solution to this, but it'll
> be interesting when it is used for a large attack.

I don't know what this software is or anything about it aside from an estimating that it appears from comments here and on GH that it's serious as it deletes highly important directories and is possibly a widely used software package.

Whenever I install from source I run the installer as non root. It will error on higher than my user privilege deletes telling me I need to be root. In this case I believe I would have seen the attempt to remove important directories as an error alert.

If I have to be root, running as non root first has helped me as a purely investigative method to installations.

What if everyone adopted an 'rm -rfi' type command for any deletes. Then you are asked: "You are about to remove $dir are you sure you are okay with this? Y/N?

In this case, what I don't get is how it's now been three days and there hasn't been a rollback, pulling of the software, patch, notice, billboard, radio announcement, Emergency Broadcast Syatem alert, or otherwise some way to halt this problem dead in it's tracks right this very second.

It's almost like:
README
This software is 'use at your own risk', etc., etc., etc., see Hacker News for any potentially dangerous side-effects caused by installing this software.
Startup School Special from YC Alum (4 available)
For those of you coming to Startup School in a week or so, I've posted a "special" to stay at our hackerhouse, get a tour of the valley, meet entrepreneurs including current participants in YCombinator, 500 Startups, students at Stanford and others.

I myself am very busy, so this is the reason for the steep price for a shared room (because you're paying for the experience). I've kept 1 of the 4 listings at only 30/night (as a subsidized price for a truly exceptional hacker), but I am going to very carefully screen anyone who inquires about that one.

Here are the airbnb links:

Regular Price:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/729619
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/729696
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/729697

Subsidized for a kickass hacker (please demonstrate this when you inquire)
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/729702

All of these also include transportation to and from Startup School.
The first real programming I did was writing games and mods for the Color64 BBS I ran when I was about 12. It was actually an interesting and modern design, I now realize...its main loop was in assembly while the apps and forum and other stuff was in BASIC, making it, effectively, a scriptable system (live scriptable, even, since you could change things on the running system). It was also a somewhat multi-user system, in that a sysop could interact with users while they were on the system. The reason it wasn't all written in BASIC was that BASIC wasn't fast enough to serve a 2400 baud connection (I believe disk routines also had some reason for being in assembly, as well), much less the 38,400 modems supported by Swiftlink.

That old C64, and the BBS culture, shaped me and my life profoundly. I should probably send Greg Pfountz (the author of Color64) a nice thank you email, if I can figure out how to reach him.

The source and manual for Color64 were released years ago, and the manual is an interesting read in terms of understanding the architecture and seeing how advanced a system could be on such a tiny machine.
The condensed gas that we see shooting off perpendicular to the side of the rocket, in 2 locations near the top - what is that?
I'll take an opportunity to ask you a question.

I saw the news the other day that you guys had written a video mixer for Linux, with integrated Chyrons, transitions, and all that. That's great work, but I do have a question about the motivation behind it.

As a former television technical director, I was curious what made you choose to write a custom software video mixer. The alternative, of course, would be picking up a cheap digital mixer, like a Grass Valley, and encoding its program output instead. Was the impetus financial in nature? Technical, since making a video mixer train work is a little challenging unless you have experience (reference signals, CCU if you have fancy-enough cameras, and so on)? Are you mixing audio in your software suite as well, or do you have an external mixer? (The rationale for each is the same, IMO.)

I'm just curious. Not saying the work isn't valued, just steaming ahead on writing a custom software mixer is an interesting decision. Production houses usually have old digital mixers in storage and might be willing to donate to your effort, too.
Three of those are policy issues (how much testing should be done on GMO's, how risk adverse should we be on nuclear power plants given the potential for shoddy construction like in Fukushima, where should we build energy plants and refineries). On these issues, the democrats are being, ironically enough, conservative, as in risk adverse. They are not denying that you _can_ grow GMO's, that you _can_ split the atom, or that you _can_ perform hydraulic fracking (which Obama has supported, so I don't see how this is a democrat issue). This is in stark contrast to the previous issues where the mere existence of a phenomenon (evolution, global warming, and the big bang) is denied. With luck, global warming will move into the policy disagreement realm, and out denial box soon.

Anti-vaccination is a fringe movement, and party independent (Michelle Bachmann got on the anti-vax wagon). The democrats aren't putting anti-vaxxers on the house science committee.
Perhaps "sharp" is not the right description. <:) I meant that when you press a key down, it is possible to feel the edges of the neighboring keys. Your finger can catch on a key's lip (if you try) and flex it up. To me, it (literally) feels cheap and flimsy. I've only had two (Lenovo) ThinkPads, so I don't know if different models or IBM's models had better build quality.
I love being able to hear their comm checks. It really makes you feel like you are actually there.
I recall them saying it was liquid oxygen venting.
Virtual plagues are interesting, but virtual genocide is certainly something to marvel at.
So what if there's no upper bound? Treat it like normal data and charge the normal price. Spideroak already does this.
DocumentationMatch: Matching Open Source Programmers With Technical Writers
MySQL versus Oracle Features/Functionality (A DBA's Journey in the Sun)
Ask HN: Any hackers in Brisbane looking for a place to live?
Hi guys,

A friend of mine (23) and I (19) share a big-ish 3 bedroom house in Fortitude Valley and are looking for a 3rd housemate, I really don't know many technical people in Brisbane other than those whom I work with - I thought this could be a great opportunity to get to know some more, also it would be really cool to live with someone who has an understanding of programming to be able to bounce ideas off, code together etc.

If you love code and are looking for a place to live close to the CBD send me an email, I'd love to have a chat!

Rent would be $200 p/w and includes unlimited ADSL2+, power, water etc. Email me at z@zensavona.com

Thanks!
A recap of #lxjs from a local's view | Geeklist Update
It's a very good question!

Launches are done in the Baltic Sea, 30-40 km. east of the Danish island Bornholm. In order to stream live we managed to get a wi-fi connection going from Bornholm to the mission control ship 40 kilometers away, but we couldn't reliably get enough bandwidth to stream all our camera positions to Bornholm. Furthermore internet connection on Bornholm is not very good. The result being that we needed to do the videomixing at sea. Only problem was that the broadcast studio, and thus the people that need to do the vdeomixing, were placed in Copenhagen. The result being this videomixer where we can send two streams from the launch site at sea: the livefeed and a mosaiq of available camera positions. The studio in Copenhagen can then remotely mix the livefeed based on the mosaiq using a webbased interface, or a commandline.
I don't know, I really hate all the vapid congratulations and "oh, that's great" and whatnot I get from friends, usually the older more polite ones. That seems to be the world this person wants.

These things do not tell me what's broken, what to work on next, etc.. There's a possibility they aren't just being nice and thing x they complimented is good and then in the big clue game of life I can search for something else to work on. Even then it isn't as good, though. Telling me about something that is broken results in no search, just me having to decide if it is worth the hours to fix/improve it.
What are rogue angels, and why are investment bankers bad?
> Look at the LuaJIT2 direct-threading post upthread for an infamous example of a performant dispatching structure that isn't easily expressible in ANSI C.

Sure, but the point of that post is that hand-written assembly can beat C-compiler-generated assembly. It's not arguing that any other language's runtime (even LuaJIT's own code generator) is going to generate assembly that's any better than gcc's in this case.

I do know that one of Mike Pall's stated goals with LuaJIT is to minimize the performance difference between Lua and C as much as possible. Though one of his methods of doing so (the foreign function interface: http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html) gives up the memory-safety of Lua to accomplish this. Even without FFI, LuaJIT is incredibly fast for functional/numerical calculations.

> If you want to keep arguing that every other language merely asymptotically approaches the performance of x86_64 assembly, that is a fine (if dumb) position.

I think what rubs some people (including me) the wrong way about these "faster than C" claims is the implied argument that C (and other non-GC'd languages) are obsolete. These claims often come from people who, as this article's author explicit states, want higher-level languages to win because they don't want to ever have to write in C or deal with anything written in C.

If people can get stuff in higher-level languages to run faster, then great, but those of us working in system-space in non-memory-safe languages are still going to beat their pants off if we combine all the tricks of their VM with domain-specific knowledge and optimizations (specifically parsing, in this case). "Faster than C" claims can sometimes feel like a big "F U" to those of us trying to innovate in system-space, like "our VM is the only system software we'll ever need." It's the Java attitude where people only want "100% pure Java" and shun JNI and anything that won't run on their VM.
That being said, Fortran is being used equally often, if not more often, in HPC applications. The reason being that modern Fortran both gives you bare bone access to the memory structures and offers array slicing notation as well as good multidimensional arrays for HPC. (C multidimensional arrays usually don't offer optimal performance, leading to the pointer arithmetic notation).

It's still an ugly language though. I've yet to find a C language extension that gives you the higher level features of Fortran however - and even then it would have to be an industry standard to be supported by the wealth of HPC compilers out there - remember it's not only x86, you also have GPUs, Itanium, PPC.. Looking forward to a world where LLVM actually gives the performance people need in that field, because architecture wise this could turn out to be a silver bullet.
Personally, I've grown bored with the apple store and don't have a reason to visit any longer...

My family owns one Mac and two PCs. When the Mac needed some minor servicing, the value of a local Apple Store became really apparent: we called, made a same-day appointment, went in, had the Mac serviced, and left happy customers in a very short period of time.

When a PC problem occurs, I call, wait on hold, slowly convince the technical support person whose first language isn't English that it needs to be shipped back for servicing, pack it up, label is properly, drive to a FedEx or UPS shop, ... it goes on and on, and it's a real hassle. Also, very stressful: who knows if you'll ever actually see your PC again? Even if you do, who knows when it'll come back?

My PC is due for replacement. Now that I'm older and have a family and many responsibilities, I'm willing to pay a premium for fast, hassle-free, local service. I'm not yet 100% sure I'll switch to Mac, but I might... and that's in large part because there's a few local Apple Stores near by.
>I'm with you about being less than thrilled with the transition to 16:9 displays, though.

Interestingly enough, Lenovo is aware of the problem; I remember reading a blog post a while ago in which someone from Lenovo said the problem is with volume: since the vast majority of uses for displays are now 16:9, it's more expensive to get square-er displays. The person speculated that, if they had 10,000 paid pre-orders or something like that, then Lenovo could seriously consider offering a different size. But it's just not feasible right now given the market for displays.

(If anyone remembers the post and can find it, post it!)
Ah, that makes sense, so you're sending a program and sorta-preview from this custom tool to a fuller production studio and it's remote-driven. That makes more sense.

Right on, thanks for answering.
World of Warcraft hacked, results in massive city deaths
What? Was he paid to promote this mouse? If I didn't know any better (which I don't) I'd think so. The one big problem with his logic is that he makes his argument seemingly based on the assumption that we only use one hand at a time when not typing.

Correct me if I'm in the minority here but when I'm at my computer (desktop or laptop) I've got my left hand at the keyboard and my right hand in the mouse. It's pretty trivial for me to type a keyboard shortcut and hang on to my mouse at the same time.

Keyboard shortcuts will always be superior for one reason: consistency. Every computer you will ever sit down at will have a keyboard with the same buttons in the same places and a 2 - 3 button mouse. Because I've learned the shortcuts for Windows and Mac I'll be productive no matter what you set me down in front of.

Now imagine I set myself up with a Brand X super duper mouse, invested a lot of time in configuring my shortcuts on both keyboard and mouse then I work there for an extended period and get real used to it. Now for whatever reason I end up somewhere where I don't have my awesome personalized configuration and Ultimate Mouse (TM). At this point I lose all $6,000 worth of those "productivity gains" either reconfiguring the system or retraining myself to remember the defaults. The way I see it, there's a fine line between just enough customization and overkill for the sake of productivity. I'm always for learning the defaults plus a few tweaks if needed that way your "productivity" is always portable.

Maybe I'm out of line though. It just strikes me as odd that someone would write about their mouse and mention a very specific one at that. This just came off to me like product placement under the guise of productivity tips. If I'm wrong then I'm sorry. Sorry that I made the implication, not that it came off that way to me.
The change also has one of my pet hates: the -f flag to rm.
It not only means force, it means ignore errors.
If you're not interested in errors, why attempt to do it in the first place?
It's sad that he still doesn't know how to use an apostrophe after all these years.
The Nefarious People(TM) involved pay very large amounts to avoid the perp walk, perhaps we should take advantage of that?

Let it be known that the public flogging has never gone out of style.
It's not. I think we're talking about different things.

Heroics are unavoidable -- sometimes there's no alternative. But it can slip into a pathological state where only heroic effort is recognised and rewarded; and so becomes the norm.

When you say "praising for effort", I thought you were making the same class of error.
Petzold's book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" is good. It starts too gently, and ramps up too quickly.

(http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/)

The Art of Electronics Lab Book has plans for building a computer and it's pretty well documented, although very old.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Laboratory-Manual-Electronics-Paul-H...)

Another good way to learn is to find a circuit diagram and run it by pencil. Just like people learn programming by writing code on paper and running the software with a pencil; writing the variables and such. Here's one (http://www.nathandumont.com/sites/nathandumont.com/files/ima...) (not a great example) but you try to work out what values you need where to get various bits working.

When you get a better circuit diagram you can create a memory map. Here's a link that describes what I mean. (http://www.clear.rice.edu/elec201/Book/hardware.html)

Good Luck!
I think what he did could have passed had he not made it official by writing letters and sending them. I think he could have conveyed all this orally in an ambiguous enough way.

The reason is that once this becomes official enough and "on the books" this kind of stuff would happen again. The real nightmare is not him doing it and getting way is every disgruntled agency employee doing it and then pointing fingers at this case saying "but you negotiated with him!".

So I think he wasn't smart enough, he could have had a chance at this had he not stirred the waters that much.

Another, general way of putting it, is that in large bureaucratic institutions (officially!) you never put your superiors in a position to make a new rule or break an existing rule.
Bet you'd never heard of "second-hand drinking" either.

Until someone gets a case of cirrhosis of the liver from someone else's drinking, there is no such thing as "second-hand drinking", just as there is no such thing as "second-hand carpal tunnel syndrome" from someone else playing too much WoW. I'll be the last to say that addiction doesn't affect others, and yes, I will agree that people can spend too much time playing video games (or getting drunk). But much like the alcoholic telling someone else they should never drink because it's "Evil", I won't take my advice from someone who obviously thinks that WoW is inherently evil.
Story currently on front page, with many comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4623849
Congratulations, exciting
"All quotes, given enough time, are attributed to Mark Twain" - Mark Twain

Actually, I saw this one assigned to Neil Bohr. Sounds like a Yogi-ism though.
"Elements of Computing Systems" is relatively compact and freely available online:

http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/plan.html

You might learn the most by doing the first 6-8 projects.
Nope, DejaVu Sans Mono is my preferred monospaced font too.
Maybe an updating checklist you tick off, as the launch progresses. Normally, the steps to amateurs just seem to be (1) Launch. (2) Don't crash.

I'm sure there are some steps before, between, and after those two. :)

It would also make it more exciting to watch, since it makes the sense of progression and success more tangible.
It's just speculation that someone used GM powers to do this. Most likely they tracked down a boss mass wipe ability (i.e. kills all players within 30 yards) that was incorrectly flagged as useable by players. You can then write an AddOn that uses CastSpellByID() to give you that ability.

The GM interface requires a special build of the WoW client, a specially flagged account, and a two factor auth token to login. It's pretty hard to emulate the client as opcodes are randomly shuffled based on the hash of the binary itself.
DOM Enlightenment: DOM scripting without the use of a library/framework
How Google's Love of Simplicity Fueled A Web Design Revolution
Doesn't it cause a "Javascript eval injection" vulnerability?

I don't know Javascript so I may be wrong here, but:

* Suppose someone uses this library to create a "MariaSQL Explorer App", where you give the app connection credentials and it connects to the database and shows you the data etc.

* A malicious attacker tells a user "have a look at my database" and the user goes to the attacker's database.

* The attacker's database (or spoof of one) has a column called 'dummy": MALICIOUS_CODE(), "colname'. notice the '"' chars inside column name.

* The MALICIOUS_CODE() runs in the user's node.js app. Perhaps it sends the attacker the passwords to other databases from the app's keychain or something..

* Profit
I have noticed some image persistence issues on mine as well. Any idea on how to fix/minimise it?
With the studio consisting of our speaker, Peter who wrote the snowmix mixer, me and a few laptops in a backroom in the local planetarium. So a studio is probably overstating it. But hey, that's what you can get with a budget of 0.

:-)
The kind of environment/attitude the author is proposing is not one that engenders excellence. The problem is not criticism, it's ad hominem attacks ("this programmer is obviously a moron" compared to "this is a stupid way to do this"). Criticism is a sine qua non for progress, and people who can't handle it have no place in an adult environment.
it was so unbelievably beautiful, how the rain caught the rocket's glow. what a beautiful way to leave the earth
Why would it be hard to generate the code for a direct-threaded interpreter?
This is absolutely fascinating, like being an astronaut without leaving my desk!
Reason why Google is no Microsoft monopoly: no copyright enforcement.

Microsoft depended on the government's ability to help enforce copyright protection, thus the government sponsored its monopoly. If Google went off suing all its users then I bet the government would care more.
Yay! SpaceX scores again, congratulations to Elon Musk and the whole team there.

Every time I watch one of these I feel that I'm watching history being made. And I wished I could stop holding my breath through the last 20 seconds or so. I also feel like I'm 6 years old again.
We have liftoff and in orbit... Nice! I got nervous. Best tech news since Curiousity =)
Profile-guided optimization is decades old. It was, for example, one of the things people loved about the (Ultrix?) DEC Alpha compiler was profile-driven optimization.
I guess the bigger question I have is how much time to you think is reasonable? I recently did a test one of my clients uses and to do it "right" took many hours.. but I also built test scripts, makefile, time testing scripts etc. But still I wonder what people think is reasonable?
You may consider showing the rocket in relation to the Earth. I tuned in at T+7 and just saw an engine burning, now at T+10 the engine cut off and the thing is in orbit. I have no idea where the rocket is at this point. Would a live Google Earth feed be a possibility?

Very cool stuff.
Well, not for a couple years, right? Anyone know when the first powered return-to-lunchpad can realistically be expected?
Something I would like to suggest, now that we're at T+00:06:40 it would be cool to see more than just the second stage engine doing its thing. The live feed from the craft is always interesting, but now that the ground cameras aren't able to provide "cool" tracking shots of the vehicle, I would like to see telemetry data. Current speed, distance from launch, and maybe a map with the position superimposed would be interesting to me. Basically something to give me a broader overview of what was/is happening. Thanks for the awesome live feed!

And Dragon is in orbit! Congratulations to the SpaceX team!
Hey Ryan,

Are you willing to relocate to the SF Bay Area after you graduate?
I'd deny that anti-vaccine idiocy is part of the Democratic platform the same way anthropogenic global warming denialism is part of the Republican party platform. Do you have any evidence it is?

I also don't know about anti-GMO idiocy, frankly.
I have a X220 with the IPS screen and it looks great despite being relatively low resolution.